This week on the Successful Nonprofits Podcast, we speak with author and fundraising consultant Ellen Bristol.

Bristol’s effective fundraising counsel is the result of 4 decades of experienceanddata from over 1,000 nonprofits that completed the Leaky Bucket Assessment. This innovative online assessment measures nine key practices that contribute to or detract from your fundraising efforts, which are summarized in her book "The Leaky Bucket: What's wrong with your fundraising and how you can fix it".
Those taking the survey included very small organizations to those with multi-million dollar budgets. Shockingly, the median organizational score on the Leaky Bucket Assessment was a C-minus.

To find out how organizations be more effective at fundraising, our conversation focused on three important factors for fundraising:

Appropriate staffing

Involving volunteers in development

Laws for fundraising performance

Hiring and supporting dedicated fundraising staff is one of the key indicators for fundraising success. Bristol notes that organizations with no dedicated fundraising staff only meet their fundraising objectives 39% of the time. For this reason, we discussed:

Why your next staff member should probably be a fundraising professional

How to hire the right person to lead your fundraising efforts (Bristol’s answer is counter-intuitive and 100% accurate)

Why promoting from within is not the best way to fill your first development position

In addition to using paid staff, the organizations that are most successful at fundraising also utilize volunteers. In our conversation, Bristol recommended providing volunteers:

Thorough training for volunteers

Scripts, collateral, and other resources to explain why the organization is worth funding

Significant staff support for volunteer fundraisers

Clear job descriptions for volunteers, board, and staff

Appropriate roles for volunteers

Opportunities to be involved in thanking donors

We finished the conversation with a summary of the four laws of performance management, and you’ll have to listen to the podcast to get these golden gems!